The Hours Before Dawn (20 page)

It was only for one more second that the hunched figure toppled and swayed upon the windowsill. Then it tipped backwards, and fell, like an overbalanced sack, into the blazing space behind.

T
he same set of people, filling the suburban sitting-room with the same air of expectant curiosity, just as they had done that evening forty-eight hours before. Only this time it was Miss Larkins’ sitting-room; it was Miss Larkins who presided over the tea-trolley, apportioning milk and sugar; sorting out teaspoons; commiserating with those of her guests who could have been knocked down with a feather when they heard of the disaster; nodding her head sagely with those who had seen it coming all along.

Miss Larkins was in her glory, and she deserved it; for it was she who had taken the Hendersons in on the night of the fire; it was she who had volunteered to accommodate them until they had decided what to do; and it was she, with the somewhat lethargic help of Edna, who had rearranged the house to make room for all five of them. And she was willing – indeed ‘willing’ hardly describes the extent of her overflowing eagerness – to keep open house for whichever of their friends were brought by concern or curiosity to her door. Edna was a little less enthusiastic about the arrangement, for it involved a lot of walking backwards and forwards; but even she was willing enough, this evening, to sit on the low stool by the window and listen to the whole, the complete story of The Fire.

For the whole story was known now. Mrs Morgan, with a little trifling help from police and other experts, had pieced it all together and passed it over the wall in its entirety. Miss Brandon was a bad lot, of course; everybody had known
that,
except for the people who had thought her such a
respectable
woman, and couldn’t get over the shock of it all. But she was clever, too; there was no getting away from it. Her plan for getting possession of the child had been most ingenious. A few days before Easter she had taken a job as housekeeper to a professional couple in an outer suburb; and from the point of view of her employers she had been residing there, with her baby, all the time. True, they had only actually seen the child twice – once on that evening when Louise had left him in charge of Edna (who had since admitted that she had not been to look at him at all, since he had seemed so quiet) – and once on Bank Holiday Friday, when Miss Brandon had boldly abducted him from the fair, confident that the episode would be glossed over by all parties because of Louise’s previous humiliating encounter with the police.

But twice was enough for these preoccupied employers; why, indeed, should they expect to see the housekeeper’s baby very often when they went out early in the morning and only came back after he might be expected to be asleep? To have seen him occasionally; to find constant signs of his presence in the form of drying nappies on the line, a pram in the kitchen – all the nursery paraphernalia which Miss Brandon had been careful to make noticeable – all this was quite enough to make them certain that a baby was living there. Their only feeling was one of relief that the child seemed to be so little in evidence and made so little noise.

Nor did they concern themselves about what their housekeeper did in her free time; they neither knew nor cared that in the evenings after her work was done she hurried straightway
out of the house and back to her former home, returning to work very early the next morning. Thus, if she had finally succeeded in stealing the child, no possible suspicion could fall on this model housekeeper. If kidnapping was suspected at all, the suspect would be someone who had suddenly appeared in possession of a baby just
after
Michael’s disappearance, not someone who was positively known to have owned one before. And meantime the schoolteacher Miss Brandon would have officially left her job and ‘gone abroad’ (as she had stated earlier, in front of a roomful of witnesses, that she intended to do); and this official departure would, no doubt, have been arranged not to coincide too closely with the disappearance of the baby.

Clever. Oh, undeniably clever. Louise accepted a second cup of tea with a hand that shook a little. She wasn’t thinking of the cleverness. She was thinking of a cot in a housekeeper’s room; a cot carefully rumpled every morning, and then made tidy. Of clean, dry nappies, endlessly washed and hung upon a line. Of a bottle left ostentatiously about half filled with milk that no baby would ever suck.

But there had been another bottle; just one. On that evening when Edna had been in charge. For one evening Vera Brandon had fed Michael; had bathed him; had settled him with her own hands into that deep, satisfied sleep. For that one evening the vast, heroic fantasy must have come true.

But the story was continuing; the questions from the company came thick and fast. Had Miss Brandon intended all along to murder Louise? Or had she only been driven to this recourse when she found that Louise had read the diary? Anyway, the plan, however hastily evolved, had almost worked. Michael had been safely extracted from his mother’s unconscious arms; the scene was all set for Louise to be found dead in a gas-filled kitchen, apparently by her own doing. It had been outside her calculations that Louise should wake from apparently deep
unconsciousness and blunder about the kitchen calling for Mark. It had been outside her calculations, too, that the tiny pilot light over the sink should be on, and should ignite the gas-filled kitchen.

‘And we can be thankful, really, that the house
did
catch fire,’ observed Humphrey, with an air of profound calculation. ‘She would have held you down, Louise, until you really
had
gone right off, and I don’t think you could have got away. She was very strong, as she said; she could have stood up to the gas much longer than you could—’

‘I don’t see that she was strong at all,’ interrupted Louise’s mother-in-law sharply. ‘She just had an obsession about it, that’s all.’ ‘A power complex—’ put in Mrs Hooper hopefully, but was silenced as Mrs Henderson ignored her: ‘She prided herself on her strength,’ went on Mrs Henderson. ‘But actually, it’s Louise who turned out to be the strong one. Much more gassed than Miss Brandon could have been, and a crack on the head into the bargain, and yet she was the one who kept her head enough to rescue the kid. And, really, it’s exactly what I’d expect. These doormat kind of girls – you don’t mind me calling you a doormat, do you, dear? – these girls who can’t say Boo to a goose, they’re always as tough as rubber really. Well, after all, you only have to ask yourself, which
is
the toughest mat your house—?’

She looked round in a challenging, argumentative sort of way oddly reminiscent of her youngest granddaughter; and then went on: ‘If you want any more proof, it’s in front of you. Louise is alive, and she’s got the real baby. The other poor woman is dead, and she only got a pile of blankets. In a way, it had to be so. She’d been living in a dream world for months, and that was the logical dream ending—’

‘That’s right,’ interrupted Magda, feeling that this was beginning to savour of poaching on her own special province. ‘She was
living in a world of fantasy. I knew, as soon as I saw her, that here was a case of inadequate adjustment to the Reality Principle. You see, to some types of neurosis, the symbolic significance of childbearing—’

‘Quite,’ agreed Miss Larkins anxiously. ‘That’s what I’ve always said: it’s the faithful attention to one’s small daily duties that really
counts.
Isn’t that so, Mrs Henderson?’

This technique for silencing Magda left Louise agape with admiration, and she was unable to answer. Besides, what could she say? She would have liked to ask them all why they were so certain, so unanimously, unquestioningly positive, that Michael
was
her child, and that Miss Brandon had been the victim of a delusion. She, Louise, was certain of it, but why were they? On what grounds did society always decide so instantly and irrevocably between fact and fantasy … ?

‘Of course, it wasn’t
real
mother-love,’ Beatrice was saying, ‘or she’d never have exposed him to the risk of being gassed like that. Really, I suppose, it was just a sort of exhibitionism. The fact that she risked keeping a diary seems to me conclusive. No one keeps a diary unless, in their hearts, they want it to be read.’

‘No,
I
think it was a kind of pride – a desire to show herself to the world as the mother of a child,’ Humphrey contradicted her absent-mindedly; and Louise noticed once again how oddly united the two seemed as they bickered gently over these almost identical opinions.

‘And to take him away from such a good home!’ Miss Larkins was saying indignantly. ‘A kind mother and father – two sweet sisters – why, a
real
mother, one who
really
loved him, would have been thankful to leave him in such a home, so much better than anything she could provide.
Real
mother- love—’

‘What most people call mother-love is a sham!’ Mrs Hooper
had been waiting several minutes for a chance to say this. ‘What they really mean is maternal possessiveness. This is a typical example—’

‘And there was jealousy, too,’ put in Mrs Henderson senior. ‘Watching Louise winning the child’s affection—’

‘The purely physical pleasure of handling a child – That’s what some people call mother-love,’ came Magda’s voice again. ‘It’s really only the sublimation of—’

Louise lay back in her chair, listening to them all. Not
real
mother-love. Take away the pride; take away the possessiveness; take away the physical contact; the jealousy; the selfish pleasure; and you are left with Love. Wasn’t there a philosophical problem that went something like that? What is a chair? Take away the back, take away the seat and the legs, and you are left with Chairness – the essence of a Chair. But not, one would suppose, with anything that you could actually sit on.

But hadn’t she, herself, been falling into exactly the same sort of fallacy when she had tried to store away love and happiness in a drawer ‘until she had time’? Thinking she could – or should – keep them separate from the tiredness, the dirty nap pies, and the sleepless nights? She felt she could understand Miss Brandon’s bitterness as she watched Louise ignoring, neglecting the boundless wealth for which she, Vera Brandon, was starving.

And yet, wasn’t it part of the glorious luxury of wealth that you could afford now and then to neglect it – now and then to take it for granted? Only the impoverished soul, surely, need be always counting its blessings?

Outside, in the light of the mistily setting sun, Margery was picking yet again at the paint blisters on the front gate. Through the wall, in their improvised bedroom, Harriet could be heard pitting her shrill desire to move into a windmill against her father’s unenterprising hope that their own house
might prove possible to repair. And Michael – why, Michael had not cried at all last night; not once! Could it mean that now, at last, he was beginning—?

‘Edna, dear, wake up; don’t you see that Mrs Henderson is ready for another cup of tea?’

Edna looked up at her aunt, vaguely smiling, as if just roused from sleep; and Miss Larkins nodded to Louise knowingly:

‘She’s got a young man, you see,’ she apologised proudly, in an undertone. ‘It – well – it rather takes her mind off things. She has other interests now.’ Her tired face beamed with such loving and senseless pride that Louise had not the heart to suggest that Edna’s behaviour seemed just the same as usual, and her interests, coiled in blue-grey profusion over the stool and rolling on to the floor, exactly the same as they had always been.

No, not exactly the same. On looking closer, Louise observed that the pattern in Edna’s lap was not for the usual Quick Knit cardigan. It was for a man’s Fairisle pullover, with a wonderful, intricate pattern, in the finest of fine wool.